We create, fund and grow

disruptive innovations.

Cyhawk Ventures is a venture capital firm that partners with extraordinary entrepreneurs looking to transform the digital world.

Founded in 2001, Cyhawk Ventures is a pre-seed and seed fund that invests in disruptive technologies in the digital marketing & advertising, new media, social, and mobile segments. We back entrepreneurs passionate about reinventing the way we experience our digital lives and invest in ideas that have the power to become category leaders.

Our founding team has nearly two decades of experience and proven success in the sectors in which we invest. As entrepreneurs in our own right, we understand how to build a great company from day one. Our portfolio includes fast-growing companies such as Matomy, Appoxee and BIScience.

We believe that our greatest advantage and the core of our success comes from our people. Cyhawk empowers founding teams through a combination of hands-on management, funding, and an extensive network of technology experts and business leaders. By forming lasting bonds with visionary founders, Cyhawk helps entrepreneurs launch a new generation of digital powerhouses.

Vision

We believe in the power of ideas - creative and disruptive ideas that influence and re-invent the way people experience their digital life. Ideas are the essence to healing the customer’s pain, providing a solution to peoples ever-evolving needs. We work with our portfolio companies to take their idea to fruition – transforming the idea into a viable product.

Cyhawk Ventures aims to build great companies based on positive corporate values and smart-applications. Our high aims help us reach our ultimate goal - maximum return for our investors.

We are not a typical fund. Over the years we have tried, tested and iterated a new way of growing companies, developing a unique business approach. We work with our portfolio companies as hands-on managers and are deeply involved in the strategy and implementation. This way we ensure the highest industry standards and our portfolio companies keep their competitiveness throughout time.

The Advantage

The Cyhawk founding team has worked side-by-side for over a decade. As serial entrepreneurs with a proven track record of building category leaders, our close-knit team has deep expertise and operational know-how in the digital marketing & advertising, new media, social, and mobile segments. We keep our finger on the pulse of the market and are active participants in each industry.

Cyhawk has developed a successful formula for identifying disruptive opportunities, building the right team, and generating sales earlier than the competition. Our strategy – the Cyhawk Progressive Product Development Cycle has evolved and improved through an ongoing cycle of testing, analysis, and refinement. It is a unique way of breaking down a complete offering into small products and releasing them sequentially so each component can be rapidly validated and sold. This method ensures each solution remains competitive and accelerates the go-to-market speed of our portfolio companies.

Cyhawk’s proprietary methodology, combined with our strong network in our core segments, enables us to meet the market from day one and therefore increase our chances of success. Most importantly, Cyhawk works intimately with each team as they scale, become major brands, and continue to deliver long term value to customers and investors.

Appoxee is an innovative mobile engagement tool for mobile app developers. The company’s goal is to help developers reach out to their users through enabling post download engagement via unique, powerful, and easy to use tools. Appoxee creates tools and services around sending interactive and engaging messages from the developers to their users, while adding complimentary add-ons that help better understand and enhance their mobile business like user feedback management and more apps cross-marketing widgets.

BIScience is a next generation advertising measurement & analysis SaaS provider for online businesses. It offers validation, measurement, and analysis solutions for online advertising activities, which is bound to maximize profits by providing insights and analytics of one’s online presence, compared to specific competitors and entire market segments, trends, and budget analyses. In addition, it offers valuable solutions for clarifying and evaluating online marketing activities across all channels: display, mobile, social, SEM, etc. All of these solutions are secure, reliable, intuitive, and usable.

iAlbums is a content platform that presents information on music being played on mobile and desktop.
Founded by music industry veterans, the goal is to was to provide a solution for the absence of experience in the new methods of music listening.
iAlbums provides value for the users, the artists and the labels. The musicians can take an active part in their iAlbums album experience, they can provide a personalization aspect to the users, and leave the old music players days in the dust. Users will enjoy an enriched music listening experience, with reviews, biographies, articles, news, photos, videos and so much more. Labels will be able to cross-promote their releases to the relevant audience.
iAlbums revolutionize the way people listen to music today.

Jottix is a technology based media agency in the online entertainment market. Founded in 2008, it is one of Cyhawk Ventures first portfolio companies. Jottix developed a multi-conversion customer acquisition platform which combines highly targeted media buying, lead generation and email marketing in order to generate outstanding results to tier one customers in the field. Jottix’s customers tap on an exclusive entertainment web sites network with proprietary products and a world-wide community of subscribers. Jottix works with both advertisers and publishers, finding the perfect synergy to maximize revenues and ROI.

Ongage is a start-up company in the email marketing arena. It was founded in 2010 by a team of email marketers with over 7 years of extensive experience in email systems, infrastructure, APIs, ESPs and MTA gateways. Ongage used the vast experience and expertise they acquired in this area in order to develop OngageConnect™ an advanced email marketing optimization platform that enables email marketers to harness the power of multiple email service providers and SMTP relays. The system is designed to help organizations increase deliverability, inbox placement and maximize ROI.

Matomy Group, formerly known as Adsmarket, is a digital media agency with a smart, cross-platform solution that specializes in the fields of affiliate marketing, display advertising, virtual currency and mobile advertising. The first company in Cyhawk Ventures portfolio from 2005, Matomy Group is a profitable venture that serves more than 20 billion impressions across 170 million unique users, on a monthly basis. Matomy Group provides global performance based digital marketing solutions for advertisers, agencies and publishers located in over 45 geographies in Europe, North America, Latin-America and Asia-Pacific.

Pluralis is a crowd sourced platform for conversion and landing page optimization. It is home to an online community of passionate creative optimizers who crave exciting online advertising challenges. Pluralis provides the first service ever that allows online marketers crowd source the optimization and testing of their campaigns and landing pages, create high converting funnels, and pay on a performance basis. Pluralis will change the way online marketers manage and optimize their landing pages.

Xertive Media is an independent trading desk, specializing in smart acquisition of traffic over vast inventory, for the purpose of direct response in selected markets and verticals. It leverages cost gaps across multiple media inventory sources, performance lift generated through the use of internal and external sources of behavioral and contextual data and RTB ad-exchange automation and optimization, in order to earn incremental margins across diverse media pricing models. Xertive Media is the only company that delivers both the personalized and dedicated service of a media agency, combined with cutting-edge Algo Trading Capabilities, and the tremendous reach of the biggest ad inventory aggregators.

Kfir Moyal

General Partner & Co-Founder

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Kfir is Co-Founder and General Partner at Cyhawk Ventures. Active in the online industry for more than 15 years, Kfir focuses on New Media, Online Advertising and Digital Marketing. He currently sits on the boards of Matomy Media Group, BIScience, OnGage and iAlbums.
Prior to launching Cyhawk in 2001, Kfir co-founded Matomy Media Group (previously AdsMarket) and grew it into a worldwide leader in multi-channel performance-based advertising. During his tenure as CEO and CTO, Kfir oversaw all strategic, operational, and technological decisions. He also formed strategic relationships with industry leaders such as McCann-Erickson and other Fortune 500 companies and grew the company to annual revenues of $100 million.
Kfir believes strongly in mentoring founding teams and paving the way for them to succeed. As an avid technologist, Kfir is prescient when it comes to identifying unrealized industry trends and new markets. He uses his wide-ranging experience in business development, strategic planning, and marketing to launch portfolio companies in the market and grow them into mature, profitable entities.
Kfir enjoys politics, traveling, art, surfing and practicing self-awareness.

Assaf Ben Asher

General Partner & Co-Founder

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Assaf Ben-Asher co-founded Cyhawk Ventures in 2001 and serves as General Partner at Cyhawk. Since his early teen years, Assaf has had a range of successful online businesses – from affiliate marketing to security products and media management. This experience has given him an innate view of what the online market is looking for, and how to successfully create and market such businesses. Assaf uses this knowledge to help lead Cyhawk in new and exciting directions. Perfectly poised to spot true innovative, ground-breaking ideas that heal the markets hurt, Assaf helped create Cyhawk’s solid foundation of portfolio companies. He is the driving force behind Cyhawk’s business strategy - using his vision, he continues to move ahead and pioneer new exciting verticals.
Assaf currently sits on the Boards of BI Science, OnGage, Jottix, Sweesh and iAlbums.
In his free time, Assaf enjoys music, friends, travelling and learning new technologies.

Lennart Reus

CTO

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Lennart Reus is one of Cyhawk’s original founders and its current Chief Technology Officer. With an innate understanding of software, hardware and programming design, Lennart knows what it takes to create highly scalable and complex Internet architectures. Autodidactic, and ever enthusiastic about new technologies, he started coding at the age of 10 and retains his love of exploring and re-inventing technology. Lennart has worked his way up through Cyhawk to the CTO position, and it is his intimate knowledge of the Cyhawk process and way of thinking, combined with his outstanding technical abilities, that makes him such a boon to the organization.
Lennart moved to Israel from Zwolle, The Netherlands. He studied at Technical University of Eindhoven.

Yuval Cohen

Advisor

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Yuval Cohen serves on Cyhawk’s Advisory Board. He brings more than 17 years of experience in the venture capital market. Yuval founded and manages Stage One Ventures, a venture capital fund focused on seed and early stage investments in the Information and Communications Technology sectors. Prior to that he was a General Partner in Israel Infinity Fund, a $100 million Information Technology fund, where he was in charge of the Communications Sector.
Since 1995, Yuval has been involved, as an early stage investor and a director, in many young startups, some of which have already gone public or have been acquired by leading multinational companies.He has played an integral role in helping management teams recruit, develop strategies, and establish partnership agreements in many of his investees' companies.
Yuval served and still serves as a board member in multiple private and public companies including Traffix Systems, acquired by F5 (NASDAQ: FFIV), Trivnet, acquired by Gemalto (EPA:GTO), Guardium, acquired by IBM (NYSE:IBM), Radwiz, acquired by Terayon (NASDAQ:TERNE), Oridion Medical, acquired by Covidien (NYSE: COV), cVidya Networks, Oversi Networks, BI Science and OnGage.
Yuval earned his LLB and MBA degrees from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
When not at work, Yuval enjoys Tennis, skiing, traveling and hanging out with his family.

Yonatan Altman

Managing Partner in APM & Co.

Yonatan Altman is a Managing Partner at APM & Co. and heads the firm's Corporate, Hi-Tech and Private Equity Department. Mr. Altman advises clients in the fields of life-sciences, clean-tech, Internet, communications, information-technology as well as clients in the manufacturing and services industries, on an array of matters pertaining to mergers and acquisitions, equity and debt financings, and investments. He also counsels privately-held and publicly-traded companies with respect to strategic planning and corporate restructuring, and specializes in spin-offs, joint ventures and cross-border commercial agreements.

Ben Silverman

Founder & Chairman in Electus

Ben Silverman, the Emmy and Golden Globe Award-winning producer is the Founder and Chairman of Electus. The company was launched in July 2009, in parternship with IAC, a leading Internet and media company chaired by Barry Diller.
At Electus, Silverman has executive produced major network and cable hits, including NBC's "Fashion Star", the "Mob Wives" franchise, and "King of the Nerds" on TBS. Currently, Silverman is in the midst of executive producing serveral new series including "Marco Polo" for Starz, "The Hero," starring Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson on TNT, "Dog and Beth: On the Hunt," a series with Dog the Bounty hunter on CMT, " Get Out Alive with Bear Grylls" on NBC, "I'm Not Dead Yet" at TV Land and more!
Prior to launching Electus, Silverman served as Co-Chairman of NBC Entertainment and Universal Media Studios from June 2007 to 2009.

News

Introducing Appoxee V2posted at: 03/24/2013, 1:56 pm
Cyhawk Ventures is an early-stage investment fund that focuses on pre-seed and seed funding in the areas of media, social, mobile, digital marketing and advertising. Managed by a team of experienced leaders, it can provide its entrepreneurs and portfolio CEOs strategic consulting and mentoring...

Interview: Emilia Dariel of Pluralis on Optimization Through Crowdsourcingposted at: 02/11/2013, 11:34 am
Regular readers of our blog will know that we are big fans of crowdsourcing. Every month, we like to show you some of the top trends and innovations in our Crowdwatch column. Independent video games, filmmakers and charities are all finding creative ways to secure funding through social media.

Pluralis Reinvents Conversion Optimization via Crowdsourcingposted at: 02/11/2013, 11:33 am
Despite having uncovered the secrets of successful Landing Page traffic optimization, conversion optimization still seems to have everyone stumped. Even when using the wittiest copy and eye-catching graphic design, it is often impossible to determine if a Landing Page will convert traffic to customers. Add to that the fact that viable testing options are generally translated into time-consuming, costly strategies based on hopeful “hunches”, and it’s no wonder that for every $92 that most online businesses spend driving traffic to their site, they spend less than $1 trying to achieve conversion rate lift.

Start-up of the week / Getting users to buy the doggie in the windowposted at: 02/11/2013, 11:34 am
What draws you inside a store when you're just window-shopping? And if you're already inside, what makes you want to shell out your hard-earned cash to buy something?

Landing Page Troubles? Let Pluarlis Helpposted at: 02/11/2013, 11:33 am
I recently spoke to Brock Kaye, the new CEO of Pluralis, about the company and their product. Pluralis takes a unique approach to a fairly common problem – landing page optimization. In lieu of hiring a designer, developer, or an SEO, Pluralis takes care of the problem for you. Pluralis is a crowd-sourced marketplace for conversion optimization.

Can you give your landing pages a better design?posted at: 02/10/2013, 10:44 am
Pluralis has developed a platformed aimed to improve conversion rates for landing pages, those pages you get when you click a link or an ad.

Lift Conversion Rates Risk-Free With Pluralis’ Crowd-Sourced Marketplaceposted at: 01/10/2013, 12:17 pm
How would you like to increase your landing page conversions without spending any money on testing, risking virtually nothing? Recently, we came across an interesting website called Pluralis.

Matomy Media to Acquire Mediawhiz for $10 Millionposted at: 01/08/2013, 2:01 pm
Matomy Media will be acquiring the American digital agency Mediawhiz and will hold her in full ownership. The estimated acquisition price is 10 Million dollars. This is a second acquisition for Matomy, following the acquisition of the digital media and advertising agency Adperio, on July 2011.

Pluralis: A 99designs-style approach to improving your landing page’s conversion rateposted at: 12/25/2012, 11:44 am
Pluralis is a kind of 99designs for copywriters. It puts writers into a competition to optimize a landing page and the one who optimizes brings the highest percentage of positive change is the one who walks away with the commission and the money. That means if you don’t win, you don’t get paid.

BIScience seeks to disrupt business intelligence.posted at: 11/07/2012, 10:11 am
BIScience seeks to disrupt business intelligence for advertisers and media buyers by providing unprecedented insight into campaigns and the competition.

posted at: 05/30/2012, 2:11 am
Many websites has long been the corner stone of establishing a new business. Even long time businesses know, that a real net presence could go far in generating revenue, and are investing many of their resources in optimizing landing pages and websites. Yet, many websites are not able to utilize their full business potential. Enter Pluralis.

posted at: 05/03/2012, 2:03 pm
The Local Angel investors never bought private jets with the millions they made of their exits; Instead, they invested in young and promising start ups in the local market. E&Y Asked those investors to pick the most promising companies in their portfolio.

iAlbums Provides Hi-Tech Liner Notesposted at: 03/11/2012, 1:48 pm
Designed to improve the music listening experience, or at least give it a retro vinyl feel, iAlbums attempts to recreate the process of reading liner notes on high-tech mobile devices. By displaying your iTunes library's album covers on a virtual shelf – with the option to organize tunes by artist, track, playlist or genre – the app lets users access and play tracks contained on the gadget.

iAlbums for iPhone Gives You the Backstory on Your Music Libraryposted at: 03/05/2012, 11:22 am
Have you ever been listening to a track on your iPod or iPhone and wanted to know more about the song or the artist. Sure, you can "favorite" the track, wait until you get home, power up your computer, sync your iDevice, find the favorite song, copy/paste the track in Google Search, and open up several tabs in your browser with various links to the info you're looking for.

Israeli VCs are back in the game: Raised $800 Million in 2011posted at: 02/29/2012, 9:11 am
After two slow years, Israeli VC industry is breathing again, but the crisis is not yet over. In 2012 the industry is expected the raise a similar amount, thanks to the new players in the game - the micro funds.

iAlbums Brings The Liner Note Experience To Your iPhoneposted at: 02/29/2012, 7:42 am
One of the bigger arguments in favor of vinyl that nerds trot out is the whole experience of putting on a record, and being able to look at the liner notes and the album art. But what if an app could give you that same experience? A new app, iAlbums, aims to do just that.

iAlbums: The Way Mobile Music Should Have Been All Alongposted at: 02/29/2012, 7:35 am
Here at The iPhone App Review, we love a good music app. And the hottest thing to come across our desks recently is the new iAlbums iPhone app from I. Albums Ltd. This title connects your iTunes library to additional content, amplifying your music listening experience in a whole new way.

iAlbum - The Album Cover in the Digital Ageposted at: 02/29/2012, 7:32 am
iAlbums, the new, free music player application that lets the user ad lyrics and video clips to his favorite music is now live on app store.

iAlbums Brings Virtual Liner Notes to Your iPhoneposted at: 02/29/2012, 7:29 am
iAlbums (free), released Tuesday, aims to recreate that feeling for anyone who’d rather listen on their iOS device than pony up for a turntable and some records.

Apps Rush: Skype, Opera Mini Next, Barbarian, iAlbums, CodeRunner, The Social Radio and moreposted at: 02/28/2012, 7:36 am
Albums is an intriguing iPhone music player app that pulls in biographies, reviews, lyrics, photos, videos, tweets, interviews and other content for the songs that you play.

iAlbums is now available at the App Storeposted at: 02/28/2012, 7:11 am
iAlbums, a new music player application that lets the user add lyrics, video clips and artist biography to his favorite songs, is now available at the App Store.

The Musical editor is tuning in to Exitposted at: 02/21/2012, 5:54 am
Users these days listen to music on YouTube and Facebook. Yet a lot of the website today cannot provide the full experience a music editor on the radio or a CD can. Four Israeli start ups are trying re-invent the way we consume music.

AdClarity Tells Advertisers Exactly What The Competition Is Up Toposted at: 02/19/2012, 5:50 am
Israeli company BIScience has a launched a new product called AdClarity, which it says will give advertisers more data than they’ve ever had about their competitors’ advertising plans.

Glue in your applicationposted at: 02/15/2012, 11:32 pm
Users download applications every day, but most of them are abandoned after a while. Appoxee is here to keep the user interested.

63 conversion tips from Conversion Conference Londonposted at: 12/08/2011, 6:43 am
Over two days in London’s Business Design Center, some of the world’s foremost consultants and speakers on conversion rate optimization gathered for the first major event of its kind in the UK. Gareth Davies was on hand to cover the event and he took away 63 top conversion tips.

Quadrennial events to help ad market grow in 2012 despite economic troublesposted at: 12/07/2011, 9:54 am
“The global ad market is therefore remarkably strong at a time when the eurozone threatens to fall back into recession and drag down the growth of its trading partners. “

How to avoid the next Fiasco: Which Start Up companies are doomed?posted at: 11/14/2011, 4:53 am
Researchers from the Silicon Valley, among them Israeli Ron Berman, claim to have figured out the reason for many start-ups failure to succeed. Companies that raise too much money in the early seed stage, hire too many employees and prefer over-sophisticated products - Beware!

Matomy Could Go Public in 2012posted at: 11/08/2011, 9:36 pm
The Digital Media group Matomy is a collection of four companies that were branded under one roof. Following a sequence of successful global acquisitions this year, The company is expected to yield 200 Million Dollars in 2012 and management is contemplating IPO.

Head of AOL Messaging (AIM) and CEO of ICQ Named CEO of BIScienceposted at: 11/08/2011, 9:38 pm
Orey Gilliam, former head of AOL Messaging (AIM) and CEO of ICQ is now leading BIScience, a successful solutions provider in the online advertising industry. Gilliam hopes to propel GeoSurf, the company’s proxy network toolbar, to new heights

HOW TO: Gamify Your Marketingposted at: 11/08/2011, 9:38 pm
Gamification is probably the most effective viral marketing method ever implemented, take advantage of this tutorial and learn how to implement it in your own ventures

Kfir Moyal and Jeff Pulver Are At It Again: Three New Micro Venture Capital Funds To Be Invested In The Israeli Marketposted at: 09/03/2011, 11:13 pm
The Micro Venture Capital trend continues. The Marker recently learned about three new micro funds in the works. The first – Cyhawk Ventures, is owned by Kfir Moyal and Assaf Ben Asher. The two, who founded CubeEffect and AdsMarket

Letting Investors In: Israeli Company Cyhawk Ventures Raises 10 Million Dollarsposted at: 09/03/2011, 11:03 pm
Cyhawk Ventures, a Venture Capital fund owned by Kfir Moyal and Assaf Ben Asher is now raising 10 Million Dollars, Calcalist was informed. Cyhawk was acting as a private “greenhouse” funded by the two owners, and now they are sharing their wealth with outside investors.